Paris: The Novel

Jules was still frowning.
    Joséphine Tessier had studied many men in her life. It was her profession. In her opinion, men were often discontented because their occupation did not suit them. Of others, one could even say that they had been born at the wrong time—a natural knight in armor, for instance, trapped in a modern world. But Jules Blanchard was perfectly made for nineteenth-century France.
    When the French Revolution had broken the power of the king and the aristocracy—the ancien régime—it had left the field open to the rich, the haute bourgeoisie. Napoléon had created his personal version of the Roman Empire, with his triumphal arches and his quest for glory, but he had also taken care to appeal to the solid middle classes. And so it had remained after his fall.
    True, some conservatives wanted to return to the ancien régime, but the only time the restored Bourbon monarchy tried that, in 1830, the Parisians had kicked out the Bourbon king and installed Louis Philippe, a royal cousin of the Orléans line, as their constitutional and very bourgeois monarch.
    On the other side, there were radicals, even socialists, who hated the new bourgeois France, and wanted another revolution. But when they took to the streets in 1848, thinking their time had come, it was not a socialist state, but a conservative republic that emerged, followed by an ornately bourgeois empire under Napoléon III—the great emperor’s nephew—that again favored the bankers and stockbrokers, the property men and larger merchants. Men like Jules Blanchard.
    These were the men to be seen riding with their beautifully dressed women in the Bois de Boulogne on the city’s western edge, or gathering for elegant evenings at the huge new Opéra house, where Jules and his wife liked to be seen. There was no doubt, Joséphine thought, that Jules Blanchard had the best of the present century.
    Why, he’d even had her.
    “What’s the matter, my friend?” she gently inquired.
    Jules considered. He knew that he was lucky. And he valued what he had. He loved the old family house at Fontainebleau, with its enclosed courtyard, his grandfather’s First Empire furniture and leather-bound books. He loved the elegant royal château in the town, older and more modest than the vast palace of Versailles. On Sundays he would walk in the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau, or ride out to the village of Barbizon, where Corot had painted landscapes filled with the haunting light of the River Seine. In Paris, he was happy trading in the great medieval wholesale market of Les Halles, with its brightly colored stalls, and bustle, and the scents of cheeses, herbs and fruits from every region of France. He was proud of his intimate knowledge of the city’s ancient churches, and its ancient inns with their deep wine cellars.
    Yet it wasn’t enough.
    “I’m bored,” he said. “I want to change my career.”
    “To what, my dear Jules?”
    “I have a plan,” he confided. “It will astonish you.” He made a sweeping gesture. “A new business for the new Paris.”
    When Jules Blanchard spoke of the new Paris, he didn’t mean only the broad boulevards of Baron Haussmann. Even from the days of France’s great Gothic cathedrals, Paris had liked to think of herself—at least in northern Europe—as the leader of fashion. Parisians had not been pleased when, a quarter century ago, in a dramatic palace of glass built for the occasion, London had captured international headlines with her Great Exhibition of all that was new and exciting in the world. New York had followed soon after. But by 1855, Paris was ready to fight back, and her new emperor, Napoléon III, had opened her Universal Exposition of industry and the arts, in a stupendous hall of iron, glass and stone on the Champs-Élysées. A dozen years later Paris did it again, this time on the vast parade ground on the Left Bank known as the Champ de Mars. This 1867 exhibition was the biggest the world had ever seen, featuring many marvels, including Siemens’s first electric dynamo.
    “I want a department store,” said Jules. New York had department stores: Macy’s was thriving. London had Whiteleys in the suburbs and a few cooperatives, but nothing dramatic yet. Paris was already ahead in size and style, with Bon Marché and Printemps. “It’s the future,” Jules declared. And he began to describe the store he had in mind, a greatpalace selling all kinds of merchandise to a huge audience.